Yes, Donald Trump, It Is “a Very Scary Time for Young Men in America”—But Not for the Reasons You Think

Donald Trump and one of his two large adult sons—avid fisherman and comparer of Syrian refugees to Skittles, Donald Trump Jr.—are scared. They’re freaking out, actually. (One might even call them hysterical!) The source of their fear? That they will randomly, completely out of the blue, like a deadly strike of lightning, be falsely accused of sexual misconduct. “My whole life, I’ve heard you’re innocent until proven guilty. But now, you’re guilty until proven innocent,” President Trump said from the White House lawn on Tuesday, with absolutely no sense of irony (more on that in a minute): “I say that it’s a very scary time for young men in America.”

Now that I’m done maniacally laughing through my tears, we’ll move on to Junior, who told DailyMailTV on Monday that he fears more for his sons than his daughters in the current political climate, because they may one day be falsely accused of sexual assault. “When I see what’s going on right now, it’s scary,” Trump Jr. lamented.

For perhaps the first and only time ever, I actually agree with Trump Jr., at least on one count. I fear for my son, too—but not because I believe he’ll grow up to be the target of a bogus sexual assault allegation. I don’t fear that, because I am a person who is aware of and actually values the truth, which, statistically speaking, is that the vast majority of sexual assault allegations are real and valid, and fabricated claims are incredibly rare, though they are often overblown in the media (see: the Duke lacrosse case; the UVA/Rolling Stone debacle).

I fear for my son, even though he’s just a baby, because he is thus far growing up in a world that is still so patriarchal that a man like Donald Trump was elected president, despite being captured on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals and being accused by an estimated 19 women of sexual misconduct. I fear for my son because toxic bro culture still looms so large that Brett Kavanaugh, a man who has been multiply and credibly accused of sexual assault, is poised to be elevated to the Supreme Court anyway. I fear for him because the men who still govern our country actually believe that Kavanaugh, and men at large, are the victims in this situation, rather than the women who are at a disproportionate risk of being assaulted. I fear for my son because his sister and I have literally taken to the streets in protest to fight for women’s rights and to vocalize our opposition to all of this, but most men aren’t doing the same—not even the “good” ones.

As anyone with access to Google and even a halfway decent sense of memory might, I also see the stark hypocrisy of President Trump’s rallying cry that men should be “innocent until proven guilty” when what he really means is that white men should be innocent until proven guilty. This was made abundantly clear by his calls for the execution of the Central Park Five, the group of New York teens (four of whom were African American, one of whom was Hispanic) who were convicted of rape in 1990 after the NYPD coerced confessions from them, and who were exonerated 12 years later. At the time of the case, Trump, then “just” a New York real estate mogul, did the media rounds and took out a full page ad in the New York Daily News that called on the state of New York to bring back the death penalty so the boys could be executed. Even after they were cleared by DNA evidence, Trump refused to accept the facts (a pattern, apparently) and clung to their coerced confession as proof. All of which is to say: This is not a man with an unbiased commitment to justice or innocence of the accused.

Rather, this is a man who is deeply sexist and allegedly abusive, who has all but openly admitted that he has a vested interest in siding with men like Kavanaugh (other white men of privilege, in other words) because Trump himself has been accused of assault (falsely, he insists, though, again, we’ve heard him on the topic, on tape, in his own words). And this is why I fear for my son the most: Because in the face of one of the most perilous threats to our democracy, so many Trump-supporting men are still invested in first and foremost clinging to their privilege; more interested in covering each other’s asses and protecting the status quo than evolving as human beings. At every opportunity, they advocate for themselves rather than the “wives and daughters” they so love to invoke when prompted to prove their humanity.

Men like Trump and Trump Jr. aren’t really scared of being falsely accused; they’re scared of losing their place in a world where “boys will be boys”: in which men can prey on young women and move through society with impunity and even perceive a Supreme Court seat as some kind of birthright; in which receiving $413 million from your father is to be a “self-made man”; in which getting into an Ivy League institution from an exclusive prep school is to succeed with “no connections” (I’d kindly refer you to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who went from the projects of the Bronx to Yale Law School and then to the Supreme Court). And these men should be scared, because they’re right. That world is in peril. And, hopefully, when my son grows up into a man, it will be gone forever.